or the past half-dozen years my teams and I have been documenting both the Risks to and Hopes for the Hudson River and the beautiful valley it dissects. The result is more than twenty short films, which we’ve shared with tens of thousands of viewers at in-person screenings and streaming via Amazon Prime and others. Now we are tackling the biggest story of them all, rising sea levels. We see evidence of it in flooding streets, subways, shorelines and offices with every major rain and wind event. By 2100, the Hudson River will have risen by six feet above today’s mark.

The smartest climate scientists in the region are already envisioning the impacts of a Hudson six feet higher, which will render homes, businesses, marinas, railroads, airports and everything that borders the river at constant risk of inundation. Trains and subways that don’t run because
tracks are flooded will become the new norm; long-time residents of beachfront communities will be forced to relocate. The same will be true of every of the four billion people around the globe who live at or near sea level. Only the most-resilient will survive.

The film is based on interviews with more than twenty climate scientists, engineers, city planners, activists, artists, writers, filmmakers, politicians and impacted residents detailing what they are anticipating in the years to come and what they are already doing to plan for the inevitable. The directors of state agencies, representatives of three different NYC mayors, the Army Corps of Engineers, some of the country’s leading climatologists affiliated with Columbia University’s Water Center and the Lamont-Doherty Observatory, plus heads of local Resiliency Task Forces, representing small towns with big worries about rising seas.

Jon and his educational non-profit, the One Ocean Media Foundation (a New York State 501c3), are currently raising funds to make the film and have had great response to-date. Filming starts Spring 2022 and a finished film ready for distribution by Spring 2023.